Slovenská literatúra

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Authors: Dana Hučková

european Avantgarde and modernism

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Authors: Jaroslava Šaková

KVOČÁKOVÁ, Lucia: THE ROAD TO SLOVAK MYTH. CONSTRUCTION OF THE IDENTITY OF SLOVAK MODERN IN THE CONTEXT OF THE IDEA OF CZECHOSLOVAKISM.

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Authors: Viliam Nádaskay

KANDA, Roman: CZECH LITERARY SCIENCE MARXISM. CHAPTERS FROM THE MODERN PROJECT

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Authors: Roman Mikuláš

ZAJAC, Peter: FROM AESTHETICS TO POETICS OF SHAKING

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Authors: Markéta Polách Balonová

The contribution provides an overview of Fay Brauer’s highly inspiring chapter “Scientistic Magnetism and Hauntological Metarealism: The Phantasmatic Doubles of Duchamp and Durville” included in the edited volume Realisms of the Avant-Garde that was published in 2020 as part of De Gruyter’s European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies series. Focusing on early work of Marcel Duchamp in great detail, Brauer discusses the rarely addressed artist’s engagement with occultism and scientistic magnetism. The concept of hauntology, outlined by Jacques Derrida, provides Brauer with methodological tools that enable her to link the seemingly negligible connection and interdisciplinary affinity between Duchamp’s artistic visions she labels as “hauntological magnetism” with the occult experiments – “scientistic magnetism” – of Henry Durville. Derrida’s idea of the recurring spectres on which Brauer builds has the potential to contribute not only to the analysis of Duchamp’s work, but can also provide methodological tools for literary studies, e.g. for discussions of recurrent motifs in the oeuvre of a given author.

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Authors: Karol Csiba

The article looks into how history is created and modelled in Milo Urban’s (1904 – 1982) third book of memoirs Na brehu krvavej rieky ([On the bank of a bloody river] 1994). The autobiographical character of the book is constructed through positioning him into various scenes and portraying him from different perspectives. The article concentrates mainly on outlining this authorial self-portrayal in the historical context of the Second World War. The memoirs provide a portrait of Milo Urban as both a public persona – writer, journalist and chief editor of the radical fascist newspaper Gardista – and as a husband and father. Methodologically, the article draws on literature that conceptualises autobiographical texts as ways of narrative shaping of the past by an individual. It is not just the personal history and individual identity that are formed in this way, but also collective memory and identity. Autobiographies as such are in this respect viewed as important part of collective memory, since they influence how we view the past and which events are to be remembered and which are to be erased.

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Authors: Hana Lacová

The article presents an interpretation of Jozef Závodný’s (1899 – 1969) play Nadčlovek ([Overman] 1928). The dramatic text deals with a utopian topic of revolutionary change of the world through technological invention. In spite of the fact that the play was staged in 1928 by Slovak National Theatre in Bratislava, it remains largely forgotten. The article outlines the way in which Závodný’s text builds its dramatic dialogues and models its characters and plot. At the same time, the contribution aims at specifying utopian motifs the play employs and strives to show the ways in which these influence the dramatic structure. The author of the contribution also provides an overview of the possible sources of inspiration (avant-garde art, film, political theatre, socialist ideology, Christian concepts) that resulted in play’s employment of multiple textual strategies and the principle of hybridisation on multiple levels (genre, characters, plot). The play accentuates political and ideological messages and this has a significant bearing on the dramatic dialogue and the category of the dramatic persona. The characters in the play are reduced to promoters of political beliefs and dialogues are narrowed down to presenting the utopian vision and as such lose their dramatic potential.

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Authors: Anton Hruboň

During the Second World War, Jozef Tiso (1887 – 1947), a Catholic priest, leader of the governing Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party, and President of the Slovak State (1939 – 1945), a client state of Nazi Germany, had become an object of political cult that persisted after 1945. After being sentenced to death by the National Court in Bratislava and executed by hanging on 18 April 1947, Tiso was ultimately turned into a martyr in the eyes of the Hlinka’s Party wartime regime’s supporters. His image as a “martyr of the nation, state, Christian faith and the Church” formed mainly by actors who fled the communist regime and remained in exile from the late 1940s until 1980s. Tiso’s “sacrifice” was massively reflected in exile poetry. The poetry of the Catholic modernist group as well as poems written by occasional poets of nationalistic orientation has strongly contributed to the creation of the persona of Jozef Tiso as a martyr – a myth which did not disappear from Slovak politics and culture even after the fall of the communist regime in 1989. Against the background of Tiso’s cult genesis and formation, the article analyses the semiotic dimension of politically engaged poetry, which has shaped his sacralised image in recent decades and led part of Slovak nationalistic organisations in the post-communist milieu to efforts for judicial and moral rehabilitation of Jozef Tiso, as well as his ecclesiastical beatification.

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Authors: Jan Malura

Poetry’s occasion. The Place and Role of Occasional poetry by Juraj Palkovič, Bohuslav Tablic and Pavel Jozef Šafárik in the History of Slovak Literature

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Authors: Nora Nagyová

Zvonko Taneski: Poetics of dislocation

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Authors: Renáta Ondrejková

Slovak Studies. Collection of Articles

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Authors: Barbora Zlejšia

The preparation of any critical edition must inevitably be based on textological research. When it comes to the prose works of Štefan Krčméry (1892 – 1955), issues to be taken into account include not only the history of the texts in question, but also the complexity of author’s oeuvre, since analysis of his prose works often confirms the need to consider both these components. Clarifying the literary-historical context, defining the position of the prose works in Krčméry’s oeuvre and identifying the features of author’s poetics helps the editor gain the basis for the creation of editorial conception that would determine the character of the edition and support subsequent corrections made in the texts. Key issues pertaining to the preparatory process include the questions of completing of the texts, their linguistic adjustment and the way of presentation. The article points to the most prominent issues Štefan Krčméry’s prose texts pose in the initial stages of editorial preparation, but also to the basic textological and editorial tasks. Some of the proposed editorial solutions are substantiated by the publishing history of the texts in question.

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Authors: Ľubica Blažencová

The article focuses on reflective-meditative poetry the Slovak poet Andrej Sládkovič (1820 – 1872) wrote in the 1860s and early 1970s. His three psalmic adaptations (poems Žalm XLIV [Psalm XLIV], Žalm XXI [Psalm XXI] and Žalm III [Psalm III]) draw on biblical texts dealing with suffering, repentance, the passing of time and eternity. The three poems show the gradual change in the poet’s work – the restless revolutionary attitude changes into thankfulness for the victory and finally to the humble acceptance of life, submitting to God’s will the joyless state of the nation and the poet’s personal suffering. Sládkovič begins with a collective elegy, pleading on behalf of the whole nation, turning to the past and showing devotion and trust in God. In the royal psalm, he uses climax and literary devices involving repetition. The final poem, an elegy of a theologian, is marked by the author’s return to the use of the Czech language and to the melodies from the Protestant hymnal Cithara sanctorum. The elegiac parts resonate with motives of negative emotional states and accusations of enemies. Each poem ends in the lyrical subject making sure he has been heard.

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Authors: Martin Braxatoris

The article tackles intratextual and intertextual contexts of irmoi in Slavic canons of the Byzantine tradition. It concentrates on the relations between irmoi and biblical canticles and troparions of canonical songs and on the function irmoi serve in creating connections between troparions and biblical texts. In the subsequent parts, the article takes a closer look at the so called Methodius’ Canon to St Demetrius of Thessaloniki and notes on various relationships between irmoi, troparions and biblical canticles, identifying forms of intratextual and intertextual references – quotations, paraphrases, refrains, common motives and identical lexical elements. The study analyses the role they play in the semantic construal of the text. Exact wordings of biblical texts and of Slavic and Greek irmoi often have bearing on the interpretation of the text and a critical edition of the canon and of its translation should therefore contain full texts of the irmoi in their original languages or in the language of the translation. Similarly, such an edition should contain critical commentaries providing the key textual variants.

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Authors: Zuzana Bariaková

Daniel Hevier: The acknowledged prose of Ján Johanides

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Authors: Irena Bilinska

Magdalena Bystrzak, Radoslav Passia, Ivana Taranenková, ed.: Contacts of literature (models, identities, representations)

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Authors: Peter Darovec

The article deals with controversies concerning the authorial self-presentation of the Slovak writer Peter Pišťanek (1960 – 2015) and changes his attitude towards the role of the writer underwent. In the 1990s, when Pišťanek was a publishing author and his work was widely discussed, he ostentatiously rejected the status of the writer. However, later, after he stopped being active as an author, he partially assumed it. Until then, he would repeatedly present himself as a non-elite word craftsman (worker). This radical public gesture brought him a unique position in the Slovak literary field in the early 1990s. He would degrade the status of the writer both in his public self-presentations and in the key works of his first creative period. In these, the characters of writers are portrayed with a radical irony. Paradoxically, at the break of the 21st century, after he publically declared that he no longer writes fiction, Pišťanek embraces the role of the celebrity author. This shift can be observed in his editorial activities, in interviews and journalism he authored at that time. Empathetic understanding of the character of the writer replaced the former ironic detachment.

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Authors: Miroslav Zumrík

This review essay discusses the monograph Love in Numbers: Sládkovič’s Marína from the viewpoint of quantitative linguistics authored by Michal Místecký, Natália Kolenčíková, Martin Navrátil and Gabriel Altmann (Bratislava: Veda, 2020). The book is a significant contribution to quantitative research of literary texts, a field currently viewed to a large extent as part of Digital Literary Studies. Using mathematical tools in the research of literary genres is not incoherent with traditional literary studies, on the contrary – it enables to create a fruitful dialogue between these approaches. This is also testified by the quantitative analysis of the key poem of Slovak Romanticism, Andrej Sládkovič’s (1820 – 1872) Marína (1846). The essay discusses the results of the collective efforts employing quantitative methods to the research of Sládkovič’s work. It concludes that the authors of Love in Numbers were able to put statistical methods and recent advancements in the field into a dialogue with philosophy of technology and that their publication benefited from the fruitful interdisciplinary character of their work.

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Authors: Viliam Nádaskay

The article offers an interpretation of Malé veľké mesto ([Little big city] 2008), the third book of poetry/long poem by the contemporary Slovak poet and writer Katarína Kucbelová (1979), the author of four books of poetry and a novella. From the point of view of poetics, Malé veľké mesto is a transitional text, a breaking point in the development of the author’s style. The book embodies a change towards a more concrete way of expression and contains topics, motives and language typical of Kucbelová’s later works. The article tackles two mutually intertwined aspects of the poem – the city and the subject. The central principle of the poem is the projection of the subject into the time and space. The city (specified as Bratislava) can be analysed from the point of view of urban studies as outlined by Olivier Mongin – through his theses on the urban situation and various forms of flows in the city and the creation of bonds with it. The issue of identity that is intimately connected with the city is read on the background of various forms the speaking subject in Katarína Kucbelová’s poetry takes. In her early work, the subject focuses on biological and physical traits, later she moves onto the analysis of her individualised experience complex and, finally, in her fourth book of poetry Vie, čo urobí ([He knows what he will do] 2012), the subject turns her attention to the society. A discussion of Malé veľké mesto illustrates the gradual abandonment of the fragmented (non)subject bearing traces of postmodernist subjectivity and a move towards a more decisive delineation of the boundaries of an individual.

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Authors: Klára Soukupová

Jiří Koten: Poetics of the Narrative Commentary: Rhetorical Narrator in Czech Literature

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Authors: Ján Gbúr

Although Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav (1849 – 1921) is probably the most well-known classic of Slovak literature, his work has not been researched in its entire complexity. The article offers an overview of literature on his work and discusses the differences between methodologically sound scholarship – including interpretations of Hviezdoslav’s work – and superficial affirmative biographies and compositional, structuralist versological, semantic and form-centred analyses. From the comparatist point of view, it addresses his early work in Hungarian and German, but also points to his literary criticism, dramatic works, structured character of his poetics and the high artistic artifice of his depictive and expressive method. The article concludes with a set of topics and research areas which have not been sufficiently addressed and hopes to elicit more scholarly attention in them.

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Authors: Ivana Taranenková

The study focuses on revising approaches to literary and cultural representations produced in the nineteenth century, an epoch that is an important part of cultural memory in both domestic and European contexts. It draws attention to the ambivalent nature of the persistence of the 19th Century in the present, in which there is a tension between its mediation by representations and their determining influence on the contemporary shape of cultural memory and its institutional forms. Part of their reassessment may involve not only pointing to their constructed nature, but also making visible marginalised representations that confront and carry oppositional or alternative meanings to the established ones. The study confronts two attitudes to nineteenth-century literature and culture - the subversive and the affirmative. Using the example of reflection on Victorian culture, it shows how a revising approach, a 'resisting reading', becomes a source of its actualization in the present. It also recapitulates this type of revising approaches in the context of Slovak literary historiography.

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Authors: Zoltán Rédey

The paper focuses on paradoxical aspects of P. O. Hviezdoslav’s personality. The poet – although considered a central figure in the Slovak literary canon, institutionally accepted authority and emblem of national culture – remains “rather unpopular and basically unread” and “incomprehensible”. Slovak literary studies, especially before 1989, praised Hviezdoslav’s folk realistic orientation – especially in his “peasant themes”. This narrative foregrounded his folk realistic orientation which was supposed to make his poetry more accessible to the common reader. By means of synecdochal interpretation of fragments of his work, the author of the article shows that Hviezdoslav’s peasant themes – by their expressive, formal and genre qualities – do not display so much a folk realistic influence as the poet’s tendency towards verbal extensiveness, stylistic “exclusivity,” mannerism, Parnassism and respect for classical models. The paper focuses on how these features influence the real status and reception of Hviezdoslav’s poetry today.

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Authors: Ján Gbúr

The article concentrates on interpreting Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav’s (1849 – 1921) ballads – the part of his oeuvre which has only been investigated marginally so far. His ballads from the late 19th and early 20th centuries (U kaplice [At the chapel], Zuzanka Hraškovie [Zuzanka Hraškovie], Anča [Anča], Margita [Margita], Studnica [The well], Smelá Katka [Daring Katka], Topeľci [Drowned], Jedlica [Fir tree], Krivoprísažník [False witness], Mladá vdova [Young widow], Matúš Stolár [Matúš Carpenter]) adapt some of the traditional themes of folk and Romantic ballads (crime and punishment, moral failure, folk customs), but also bring new motives (search for the spiritual path from pragmatic truth criteria, property disputes and unorthodox solutions to life problems, social and economic disparity and its effects). Comparison of Hviezdoslav’s ballads with those written by Slovak poets of the Romantic period Janko Kráľ and Ján Botto shows his authentic realist attitude in the handling of the genre. Hviezdoslav accentuated the epical side of the narratives, employing several means of representation (on the level of the narrator and on the level of the structure of the stanza and verse). He realised the lyrical side of the narratives, their balladic atmosphere – also through the functional structure of the verse – but primarily through expressive, lyrical depictions and commentaries.

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Authors: Eva Palkovičová

The article is concerned with literary representations of everyday life in the novella by the Slovak author Mikuláš Štefan Ferienčík (1825 – 1881) Bratia ([Brothers] 1863). The novella critically addresses Romantic idealism which was at that time – in the 1860s – already perceived as outdated and lacking function and presents the reader with a new type of nationally conscious individual: a family-oriented middle class man, successful in his career and respected by the society. The protagonist of the novella does not understand his national identity as an abstract spiritual value, but makes it a part of everyday situations (during meals, events, in shaping family relationships). By doing so, he also helps build national awareness in other characters in the novella. M. Š. Ferienčík not only offers his readers a practical example of how to combine personal happiness with the imperative of building the national society, but also a new solution to the key problem of Slovak Romanticism – “the embracement of the spirit and matter”. The article draws on the category of everyday life as conceptualised by the American literary scholar Rita Felski. In her view, everyday life is a sphere of human activities characterised by the domestic space, cyclical time and the modality of habit.

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Authors: Jana Juhásová

Rácová, Veronika, ed.: Textological Studies

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Authors: Viliam Nádaskay

Any, Carol: The Soviet Writers’ Union and its Leaders. Identity and Authority under Stalin

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Authors: René Bílik

Tatiana Sedová, ed.: Insights Into the Recent Past and Present. A Contribution Towards the State of the Art in Social Sciences and Humanities

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Authors: Marcel Forgáč

The article analyses the function of intra- and intertextual references in Ivana Dobrakovová’s first book Prvá smrť v rodine (First death in the family, 2009), taking the principle of disintegration as the basic principle of Dobrakovová’s writing. As a result of author’s intratextual work, the texts transgress the genre of short story and foreground the monoperspectival narrative consciousness. This in turn leads to a pronounced relativisation of the position of the narrative category of character and to situationally constituted narrative forms as related to the “theme-problem” horizon of the work. Intertextual work, on the other hand, contaminates the monoperspectival narrative consciousness and in this way disqualifies it. The principle of disintegration leads to an accentuation of the presence of the implied author which in turn makes the text seem more autobiographical. The figure of the implied author (which can never be identified with the empirical writer) is aesthetically productive: although it is fully governed by the poetics of the text, it also allows the readers to evoke the empirical author. The poetics thus creates conditions for ambivalence – the analysed texts can be read both as fiction and as autobiography.

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Authors: Edita Príhodová

The article provides an insight into the writings of Slovak Catholic literati published between the end of World War II and the establishment of the communist totalitarian rule in Czechoslovakia in 1948. The writing of Catholic literary critics concentrated in two religious-cultural periodicals Nová práca and Verbum. For both magazines, the article draws on their respective historical-contextual backgrounds and points to differences in their visions of cultural work. Subsequently, it characterises the way the periodicals profiled their literary criticism in reviews, glosses, commentaries and articles dealing with more general cultural topics and provides profiles of the three most significant literary critics – Aloš Stankovský (1925 – 2002), Vojtech Mihálik (1926 – 2001) and Jozef Kútnik Šmálov (1912 – 1982). The article is a contribution towards a better knowledge of the Catholic literary criticism that formed alongside the poetry of Slovak Catholic Modernists. The work of Catholic literary criticism has not been studied as much as the poetry of Catholic Modernists and this article aims at rectifying this deficiency somewhat.